Category Archives: Health Care

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Warning: If you have an insurance policy purchased at an Obamacare “exchange” last year and the price is going up you should shop around for a new one. If you just let the plan renew your insurance company might be screwing with you.

Don’t be fooled, prices are not going up much under Obamacare. If you go to the exchanges and shop around you’ll see that.

But if you just let your insurance company renew your existing policy they will scam you with a price increase as much as 20% — even more.

Consumer advocates and Obamacare officials are urging the more than 7 million people who enrolled into health insurance for this year using one of the health insurance exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act to come back and look for a better deal.

… Why bother if you like your health plan? Because there’s a pretty good chance keeping your current policy will squeeze your budget, even though premiums nationwide are rising by a small amount on average.

[. . .] In 48 cities, the cost of the benchmark plan is actually going down next year by 0.2 percent before subsidies, according to data analyzed by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

“Consumers should shop around,” said Marilyn B. Tavenner, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which runs the federal insurance exchange serving three dozen states. “With new options available this year, they’re likely to find a better deal.” She asserted that the data showed that “the Affordable Care Act is working.”

Of course, if they had included a “public option” where you can just buy into Medicare, none of this would be happening. But We the People are not allowed to do that, because capitalism.

‘Republican Cuts Kill,’ which was produced by the Agenda Project Action Fund, mixes disturbing footage of the Ebola outbreak—including images of body bags, hazmat suits, and corpses—with clips of Mitch McConnell, Pat Roberts, Rand Paul, and Republicans in some of the most competitive races around the country demanding more spending cuts. The demand for cuts is juxtaposed against testimony from top CDC and NIH officials detailing how budget cuts substantially hampered their ability to address the crisis.

Please support the mission of the Agenda Project Action Fund by clicking on the link and donating here! http://apaction.com/

Dr. Tom Frieden, Director of the Centers for Disease Control, speaking on the newshour:

“We have two things in this country that they don’t have and they need in West Africa. One is good infection control in health care facilities so it doesn’t spread there. And the second is good, core, tried and true public health, find contacts, trace them, monitor them, if they’re sick isolate them. If you do those two things you can stop ebole.”

Exactly. We have that, they don’t. So why are people getting on airplanes there, in a country that does not have the ability to stop the spread of this disease?

Frieden says if flights are stopped more people will want to leave. I don’t get that. Imagine what happens when someone gets off a plane in … pick your poor country with poor infection control.

One thing he says — to keep safe we have to help stop the outbreak there. Of course.

How many news stories have you seen telling people that the Obamacare “deadline” has passed? For example, this from AP,

The deadline has passed, and so too the surprise grace period, for signing up for health insurance as part of the nation’s health care law.

How can you avoid thinking, “Wow, I missed the ‘deadline’ and now I can’t get insurance!”?

Here’s the deal: You can still get insurance, it just won’t start on Jan. 1. That’s it. Big deal.

Yes, you haven’t been able to get insurance until now and you really want to be covered. Yes you wanted to start on the very first day. But don’t worry, you can still get insurance. And you may have heard that there is a penalty for not having insurance? This is how that works: If you are uninsured for 3 or more months in a year you have to pay a penalty of $95 this year, more in following years. So get your insurance by the end of March to avoid the penalty.

Don’t let stories like this trick you into thinking you missed out and can’t get insurance.

Do YOU actually know anyone who had a health insurance plan that was cancelled because of Obamacare (not because the insurance company decided to) and who went to the health care exchange and did not find a better plan for less money?

It turns out no one actually knows anyone this actually happened to. One more made-up propaganda story from the corporate/conservatives.

Now compare this with the MILLIONS of people who are getting health insurance now, who couldn’t before.

2) Lowering the Medicare eligibility age takes the most expensive people out of the private insurance pool, which lowers everyone else’s premiums, and these people then become the lease expensive people in Medicare, which lowers the cost-per-person.

I think it’s pretty cool that people can buy health insurance now, even if you had acne as a kid. And it’s pretty cool that insurance companies can’t decide not to pay if you get sick. That’s a HUGE change. SO many of my friends were working just so they could get health insurance.